The Silversmith's Wife _ Sophia Tobin

by Tobin, Sophia

  ‘He used to say he wanted to be a gilder to make more money,’ she said. ‘I said if I’d wished to marry a dead man I’d have trimmed my bonnet and paraded around the churchyards looking for one. I said I wanted him to have the full span of his life, and have it with me.’

  Alban nodded and smiled. It was rare to see a gilder live beyond thirty; subsumed in mercury fumes all day, they were paid well but died young. Yet it sounded like something Jesse would have offered to do: a rash promise, made with no expectation of fulfilment.

  Agnes’s smile faded. Away from the fireside and her normal wifely exertions, she looked unlike herself. With the smile gone, her full face fell slack. Her cheeks were not rosy, but a pale colour that reminded him of the dough she was forever kneading.

  She looked up and caught his eye. ‘When I told him about the new babe, he could barely raise his head and speak to me,’ she said. ‘He is melancholy. Does his soul make him sick?’

  Alban put the hammer down and leaned on the bench. The sudden intimacy of the question made him uncomfortable. ‘I doubt it is that,’ he said. ‘Illness comes. There is no reason.’

  Agnes nodded, and crossed her arms over her chest, staring at the floor intently as though she was seeking answers there.

  ‘Agnes Chamac,’ Alban said. ‘You are a worrier, and I never knew it.’

  She answered his smile with one of her own, though the worry stayed in her eyes, behind it; how long had her fear been there, he wondered? Poor, jolly Agnes, who everyone believed was well and strong all the time; who never faltered.

  He put his arms around her, held her briefly, tightly. ‘Do not think on it,’ he said. ‘Jesse lives for you.’

  As he released her, she looked at him as though she wished to believe him, and he looked back at her, trying to stay steady and strong, but feeling as empty inside as he had on the night journey from Chester. He could only see the rutted road, the grass waving in the wind, the full moon, and the faces of his fellow passengers, frightened that someone might come and take all that they had.

  They both jumped at the sound of the workshop door slamming. ‘Won’t you come up into the light?’ said Jesse. He was standing at the top of the stairs. ‘Don’t you get sick of the darkness?’

  ‘I never think of it,’ said Alban. ‘But as you both ask so well, I will come with you.’

  The children were sitting tamely enough by the fire when the men took their place at the table. As Alban bit into a slice of bread a deep sense of well-being spread through him: the soft warmth of Agnes’s bread, the salty butter prickling his taste buds. As he chewed it Agnes ladled pickled cucumbers on to his plate alongside a large slice of cheese.

  ‘Enough there,’ said Jesse. ‘We don’t want him so fat and lazy that he can’t work.’

  Agnes sat down at the end of the table, her gaze moving backwards and forwards between the two men. In the background, Anne, Agnes’ and Jesse’s eldest daughter, was reading a psalm to her brothers and sisters.

  ‘I should take my break more often,’ said Alban. ‘Though it only makes me realize how much I would like to sleep in front of the fire.’ He bit into a pickled cucumber, and as he crunched on it noticed that Jesse had not yet eaten anything.

  Jesse placed his palms on the table in a slow and measured movement. ‘Go to the children, would you?’ he said quietly to Agnes. Alban watched warily as Agnes moved away without looking at him. ‘Is something the matter?’ he said to Jesse.

  ‘I was speaking to some acquaintances at the Hall today when I took those pieces to be assayed,’ said Jesse. ‘They had news of Bond Street.’

  Alban scanned his cousin’s face. Robbery was the greatest hazard for those who dealt in precious metals, and his first thought was for Mary, undefended in her late husband’s establishment. ‘What’s happened?’ he said. ‘Have they found out who killed Renard?’

  ‘No,’ said Jesse, glancing away. ‘It relates more to what happens next. One of my acquaintances raised a point that might be of interest to you. I had not thought of it, but I warrant you have. Mary Renard will have to marry again.’

  Silence.

  Alban bit into a pickle with a savage crunch, and sat chewing defiantly under his cousin’s grave stare.

  ‘Her husband’s barely cold,’ he said, once he had swallowed it. ‘Have you all chosen a candidate?’ He couldn’t help the tarnish of bitterness on his words; his eyes flickered down to his plate then up to Jesse’s face again, searching for information.

  ‘No,’ said Jesse. ‘Dr Taylor is meant to be dealing with the will, but one of the trustees – a crony of his – has a looser tongue than him, and spilled it all to a friend of mine who keeps him in seals and trinkets. Renard left his affairs in some disorder. It seems he had some idea that Mary should marry a cousin of his, but the cousin is dead. Thanks be to God: one Renard husband is enough for a lifetime, I would think.’

  ‘Why does she have to marry again?’ said Alban. He felt anger flare up in him as Jesse rolled his eyes. ‘If it is all left to her she may manage it in some other way, surely?’ He thought of Mallory He remembered her as a child: her hard, glittering eyes, even then, the flame of animal vitality in her. She was his hope for a moment: he was sure she knew more about business than both her dead husbands had, put together.

  ‘A woman cannot run such a business without help,’ said Jesse. ‘I know, some do, a woman such as Mrs Bateman. But she had a lifetime’s more experience than Mary, as well as a more indulgent husband who allowed her to share in his affairs. Mary knows nothing of the business, I imagine; Renard never let her near it, no, nor anyone else either. She has no friends to step in, apart from Grisa, who is . . .’ He waved his hand in the air, a disparaging gesture. ‘It seems Taylor is in a rush to marry Mary off. He thinks she is in need of protection.’

  ‘What business is it of Taylor’s?’ said Alban.

  ‘He is the executor, and main trustee,’ said Jesse. ‘In charge of her too, as well as the money. It’s no surprise. Taylor and Renard lived in each other’s pockets.’

  ‘We do not know the true situation. It is pointless to speak of it,’ said Alban.

  ‘It is good to anticipate,’ said Jesse. Finally, he took a bite of the bread and butter, and crammed a pickle into his mouth. ‘You should ask her,’ he said, his mouth full.

  Alban sat back in his chair. He was half of a mind to leave the table, go back down into the cellar, and begin work again. He need never say anything; he need never even acknowledge that he had heard Jesse’s words. But something about the way his cousin was watching him made him think that he would not leave it. Not this time. Things had changed in the last eleven years; Alban would not be left, unchallenged, to do as he wished. There was something driving Jesse; an imperative to secure Alban’s happiness, to break through his obstinate silence. Alban wished heartily he had stayed in Chester, where those he knew would have left him to pursue a quiet life.

  Jesse swallowed his food. ‘What do you say to it?’ he said. Alban could say nothing: he shook his head.

  ‘There was a liking between you,’ said Jesse, ploughing on. ‘That day in the church. I saw it, plain as day. And if I could see it . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘You saw nothing,’ said Alban. ‘You saw nothing but me look at a pretty girl. That is all.’

  ‘And all your questions afterwards?’ said Jesse. ‘Your sudden desire to leave London when I said the match was settled? You couldn’t get to the mail coach quick enough.’

  Alban pushed his chair back. ‘Thank you for the victuals, Agnes,’ he said, and left the room, descending the cellar steps, closing the door quietly behind him.

  The workbench was as he had left it; the piece of silver there, waiting. But as he touched it, he knew he could do nothing with it, his concentration spoiled. He swore under his breath. As the fury surged through him he wanted to pick it up and hurl it across the room with a force that would crumple it against the wall. All he could do was stand there, leaning forwards agai
nst the bench, waiting for it to pass. He heard Jesse come down the steps, and when he looked up his cousin was waiting.

  ‘There is nothing, nothing to recommend me to her,’ said Alban.

  ‘Your accounts are all in order, I understand,’ said Jesse. His tone was blunt, unemotional; it had a kind of formality that Alban was grateful for, however fleetingly. ‘You have funds,’ added Jesse. ‘I know you do.’

  ‘Yes. But.’ Alban couldn’t describe the weight that sat on his chest.

  ‘Is there some other woman?’ said Jesse. ‘Some prior attachment?’

  ‘No!’ he said, in outrage. He walked up and down alongside the bench, his hand running across the smooth wood.

  ‘I vowed I’d be a man such as Renard,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Better than him, even. I knew that was what I should be, and that I had the capability. But I didn’t hunger for it, I didn’t reach, or push, or attain. Mine is a history of lost chances. She is just another, you see.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Jesse. ‘Understand me. There will be men crawling all over that shop in Bond Street tomorrow like maggots on meat. You have another chance. She could not ask for a better husband, a better man. Let her decide it.’ He blocked Alban’s path as his cousin tried to pass him. ‘Let her decide it,’ he said again. But Alban had already pushed past and was running up the stairs.

  The daylight hurt Alban’s eyes. He walked quickly away, not wanting to be caught by Jesse. At the first dram seller he saw, he took a drink. It tasted foul and hot. He walked on, haltingly, winding his way through the streets. He remembered the day in church when he had heard Mary’s banns read. He recalled her brother’s face, and the sunlight on the stone floor of the church as he spoke with Mary and her father before they moved away from him. Then, Renard had come to him, standing tall and straight in his finery. The man had a handsome face, and an easy smile. ‘You are Jesse Chamac’s cousin, are you not?’

  ‘I am, sir,’ Alban had said. They had stood there for a moment, Renard speaking of the trade, his voice ranging pleasantly over subjects as though Alban was his equal, but his dress and his watch indicated otherwise. He seemed perfectly relaxed, and his smile never wavered; Alban thought how engaging he was, and imagined him charming his customers.

  Several aisles away Eli gave a little cry as he was lifted up by Mallory, struggling with her, but with a smile on his face. Renard’s face changed, and though Alban could not remember the colour of his eyes, the content of his stare had remained with him: cold, and full of spite, as though the child he watched was an inconvenience, a blemish on the pleasant picture of a morning at church.

  ‘That child,’ he had said, in the same lyrical tone, with a hint of a French accent. ‘I cannot look at him without wishing to raise my hand.’

  Alban left the church; and for days he had been haunted by the memory of Mary’s smile when her father had introduced her as Renard’s bride.

  Eleven years later, Alban walked quickly down the London streets. He had not put on a coat and the winter air crawled over his skin. Jesse’s words had angered him, raising emotions from the past that he had no wish to confront. He had meant only to escape the workshop, but as he walked his route bent towards the west. He reasoned that his feelings had been just the tremors caused by memory, echoes of something that no longer truly existed. If he could look her in the eyes again, and use logic to decipher his thoughts, perhaps he could lay it all to rest.

  He followed the route he and Jesse had taken four days before, stopping every time he came to a taproom or a beerseller, throwing down spirits after ale. He tried to unpick the past, but underlying his thoughts was the question that had always haunted him: why had she married Pierre Renard?

  The drink desensitized him. It was two and a half hours before he reached Bond Street. He told himself he was walking straight, yet he felt that numbed hesitance: a precursor, a whisper not yet loud enough for him to heed, that he would think of this later with shame. For now, the drink had taken the edges off life, so he proceeded with confidence.

  On Bond Street everything seemed brighter than before, the colours more intense, the edges sharper. The sky’s blue was a mixture of ice and lapis, without a cloud. The grey of stone against it, the burnt-wood brown of bricks cut from the London mud and stained by the city’s smoke. Had he never noticed these things before? he wondered, he who prided himself on recognizing beauty, on seeing detail where others saw only the mundane essentials of life. Where there were carved details, be it a bunch of grapes or only a volute, double-lined, cut in stone, he stopped and looked at it, as a child looks at a ladybird crawling on a wild flower: with fascination and excitement. The window displays and people did not interest him as much as the buildings did; the busy road, the noise, he could ignore. His progress down Bond Street was slow.

  The ladies and gentlemen had come to buy things: silver, jewels, sweetmeats, furs. Their carriages and sedan chairs filled the road, and their feet the pavements. More than once, in his unsteady state, Alban’s shoulder caught another, earning him a sharp reprimand, but he continued on, expecting at any moment to be pushed into the path of a horse by an officious manservant, but somehow knowing he would deal effectively with trouble when it came. The liquor he had drunk gave him the certainty that he was able to defeat the hundreds of foes, natural and unnatural, that had barred and would bar his way in the world; it gave him the conviction he could survive. This new view made everything possible, suddenly; even the possibility of love. With it came an intense desire to see Mary’s face and gauge if there was any trace left of the girl he had once known.

  He found a space opposite the Renard shop. Or, more accurately, he carved a space out with his sudden stillness, refusing to be carried on the relentless crowds of shoppers down Bond Street. People flowed around him. How he stared, intensely, at that shop front, looking for meaning (like a fool, he thought) in something dumb, unseeing and unfeeling: as if glass, bricks and mortar could speak to him. The tumult and excitement in him, the flame lit by Jesse and the drink, began to gutter and die. For though he knew he could live whatever came, he could not find the words to speak to Mary, even to ask for her, without drawing ridicule on himself.

  He was not like Renard. He had no words. He never wished to explain, or excuse himself. He had lived with acceptance, at a distance from the things that could have given him joy or pain. He had nothing to account for: the sheet was clean. He did not wish to apologize for himself, and yet he felt unworthy.

  He kept telling himself that he could lay it to rest. For it seemed so strange that this ache in him, this sense of loss, had been based on such brevity of acquaintance. He had never said the word love in his mind when thinking of this cherished stranger, and did not want to account for why she should be so precious to him, dearer than his own flesh, when they had spent so many years apart. If it was love he felt – and he could think it, after so much drink – then it was a love long buried and based on unknowing.

  He stood watching for some time; minutes passed, then an hour, and still he did not move on. When the shop door opened, and Mary came out, he felt shocked, though he had waited for that reason, with that hope. She was dressed in black, her hair up, her dark eyes paled by the sunlight. There was a wildness about her look that reminded him of Grisa’s word. Insensible. She was alone, divorced from propriety. Then she looked up from adjusting her cloak, and saw him.

  They were separated by Bond Street; carriages, horses, people moved between them in a blur of colour and noise. She was the fixed point he kept his eyes on, and she did not draw her eyes away.

  He saw her lips move; he could not tell what she was saying. One word. Sir? You?

  He did not know how long they stood there. It was she who crossed the road, eventually; he could never after think of that without shame. When she reached him, they kept a good foot apart, for all the others moving around them.

  ‘Mr Steele?’ she said. She looked down when he nodded, took a breath. ‘You probably don�
�t remember me,’ she said. ‘My name is Mary Renard.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said. In his mind he begged whatever watched him, whether it was God, the sky or just his own thoughts, to keep his voice steady, to stop himself from slurring the inane things he was going to say. But already reality was breaking in: he was unkempt, dressed in his work clothes, smelling of a tavern. He bowed briefly. ‘I would not have chosen to meet you like this,’ he said.

  ‘You did not wish to meet me?’ said Mary, and he saw the hurt in her eyes.

  ‘No!’ he said. ‘Not as I am now, dressed only for the workshop, and the smell of drink on me. I am not normally so. Let us move a short way; I would speak with you.’

  She acceded by following him. They walked in parallel, still apart, as though each separate and unseen by the other, buffeted by the shoppers, and unaware of them. Near the junction of Old and New Bond Street, at Grafton Street, they were able to turn off the main thoroughfare, and stood awkwardly as the flow of people continued without them, both looking on at the ongoing rush that moved ever forwards like a river. ‘And this is low season,’ he said, looking around them. Then, he knew he must finally turn towards her. ‘How are you?’ he said, quickly. ‘I must give you my condolences.’

  Mary stared at him. ‘I am well, thank you,’ she said. She forced a smile, while her eyes remained unreadable. ‘And what of you? Where have you been, all these years?’

  ‘In Chester,’ he said. ‘It does not seem so long. When one does the same thing every day, the years fly.’ The evenings in a small, dark room in a lodging house: drawing by candlelight, putting the elements of his silver designs on paper. The days: never realizing the designs, only doing the bread-and-butter work. One woman in those years, her white back turned to him, her dark plaited hair so long the end rested on the bed. He had not cherished the sight of her as he had the stacks of drawings, littering the table and the floor, drawings he would one day categorize, one day fulfil, one after the other. He had sworn it; he had sworn many things. One evening he had even sworn he would return to London and seek out Mary, when, drawing a design, he had found beneath his hand a cypher: her initial, and his, intertwined, drawn without calculation or thought. The memory of it was a small stab in him; it made him catch his breath, for he had been a younger man then, and he wondered if he might have saved her from the sadness that now enveloped her.